In the Trenches: Data Head

Ever played Cranium? Hubs and I used to be killer at it. Don’t know how things would go today, but that’s beside the point. One of the question types was ‘Data Head’. He and I both being massive nerds usually rocked those questions. And I’ve worked in various types of research, sometimes statistics were part of the gig. Put those together and you might see where I’m going. If not, I won’t keep you in suspense.

Data is good. And, while people can lie very convincingly using data and statistics, as long as you keep methodology and motive in mind you can usually sniff out bias. Despite the potential pitfalls, I do like data. The rawer the better. So, I’ve been doing a bit of data mining into the QueryTracker timeline feature.

Agent	Day 1	Day 2	Day 3
Agent #1	92	86	84
Agent #2	14	14	14
Agent #3	159	111	84
Agent #4	10	7	3
Agent #5	162	135	111
Agent #6	55
Agent #7	15
Agent #8	303

Looking at the data over the past three days, you can see some information. I’m not going to say trends because n=3 is a lousy dataset. Three things jump out at me, and combined with other information raise some questions.

Let’s start with Agent #2. One piece of information I can add is that my query has occupied position 14 in their queue since I submitted it. So, approaching 75 days and it appears that their queue has not moved. To me this raises a question and a concern. The question is are they just the epitome of the ‘silent rejection’? The concern is that something majorly disruptive is going on in their life. If this is the case, I hope it is something good.

Looking at the agents #6-8, who I queried yesterday, you can get and idea of their queue lengths. Overall, tracking the data in this maner is allowing me to estimate when I might see a response to my query. Is the estimated, or presumed, date of response a solid point?

Of course not. But, I do find some comfort in being able to see things are moving along. It helps me to wait as long as I know the wheels are still turning.